How the new Facebook Timeline will affect your mobile experience

If you haven’t turned your Facebook profile over to the new Timeline setup the company has been slowly rolling out for about a month, your time has just about run out. Timeline is coming to your profile, be it online or on your iPhone or iPad. As AllThingsD reports, Facebook is pushing the Timeline update […]

If you haven’t turned your Facebook profile over to the new Timeline setup the company has been slowly rolling out for about a month, your time has just about run out. Timeline is coming to your profile, be it online or on your iPhone or iPad.

As AllThingsD reports, Facebook is pushing the Timeline update to all user profiles, which will rearrange Facebook posts in such a way that you’ll be able to see older posts and items, rather than just having them fall off your Facebook profile forever. The update to Facebook has slowly come online for some users and has been somewhat available in Facebook’s iPhone and iPad apps, but “over the next few weeks,” Timeline will show up for everyone, accompanied by a warning of the change-over.

What’s important to note about Timeline is that when users start seeing the warning pop up in their web browsers and iOS apps, they’ll have entered the point of no return – Facebook is pushing the update to everyone, and if there’s anything on your Timeline you don’t want to be there, you’ll need to get rid of it in a week-long grace period.

During that approval process, it’s possible to mess with your Facebook timeline on your iPad or iPhone in order to add or remove things from the public sphere, but it’s more difficult than if you did it on your computer’s web browser. Hiding posts on your timeline in the Facebook iOS app or with the mobile version of Facebook’s website, m.facebook.com, can be done by swiping the entry you want to change. Once you swipe a status update or photo, for example, an “x” appears in the top right corner of that entry. Tapping the “x” lets you either hide the post from the timeline or delete it. This allows you to keep full tabs on what about you people are seeing, even when you’re not at your computer.

One of the only other capabilities available to browser-based Facebook users but not those working from an iPhone is the Activity Log, a new tool that Facebook just released that allows users to see everything they do on Facebook. It’s a fast and easy way to be sure that things you’re doing on Facebook are set to the privacy you want them to be. The Activity Log is only visible to you, but you won’t be able to access it via the iPhone mobile site or app.

The good news is that Facebook seems to have done a lot to make sure the mobile versions of the social network support the new features pretty well. You can add your “cover” picture easily from your iPhone’s camera roll, for example, right within the Facebook app. It’s little things like this, and the ease and speed of Facebook’s mobile privacy controls, that should help make the transition to Timeline a fairly painless one.

Phil Hornshaw is a freelance writer, editor and author living in Los Angeles, dividing his time between playing video games, playing video games on his cell phone, and writing about playing video games. He’s also the co-author of So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler’s Guide to Time Travel, which attempts to mix time travel pop culture with some semblance of science, as well as tips on the appropriate means of riding dinosaurs. Check out his Google+ profile.